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EFF Attacks Online Gaming Patent
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The EFF is attacking more bogus patents. This time they're going after the 'method and system of playing games on a network' which covers tournament ladders, online rankings and advertisements. The patent in question has already been asserted against a number of small companies who know that licensing it is cheaper than litigating. Ars Technica's coverage mentions that Netrek looks like a good source of prior art. 'Netrek, an online multiplayer game with origins in the mid 1980s, makes use of much of the same technology described in Goldberg's patent. Much of the code for Netrek is open source, and its development is archived online; the source code was first posted to Usenet in late 1989. The EFF has also documented other instances of prior art with the assistance of students at the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.'"
There was top-down, space themed, multiplayer game on Athena (MIT) in the late 1980's that had Asteroid-like graphics. Anyone remember it?
Also does anyone remember a tile game (around the same time) with a train and tracks called "Software Engineer".
Prior art is sometimes everywhere.
Oh, damn, that give back fond memories.
I nearly didn't finish my education because of that game.
I had to quit after breaking my 4:th mouse and it was beginning be embarrasing to go to the computer-support and ask for a new one.
Ah, the joys of ogging a base near their home planet or smacking a DD carrying 5 troops.
I'm getting withdrawal, I wonder if there's anyone still playing.
"BenDover", captain.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
The joke's on them! They're using my method of debunking bogus patents by research into prior art! If only that guy hadn't patented blackmailing someone who is debunking bogus patents by brandishing your own patent for debunking bogus patents, I'd be rich! :(
which is totally what she said
Most of this stuff just seems to be flat out obvious. Granted, I've only read the abstract (which was just plain incoherent, if you ask me) and skimmed the actual patent. I fail to see anything of merit. It sets out a broad, nebulous set of rules that could be interpreted to be any number of things. I imagine that when this was filed the patent office had dummy mode set irrevocably on, a al BOFH.
This is a particularly bad patent, and kudos to the EFF. As we all know, small strokes fell mighty oaks.
I got a catholic block.
First post redundant? Gotta love slashdot... I know, I must be new here, don't reply me with that stupidity.
I think I should patent the business process of establishing patents based on clear prior art and then suing companies for the use of my intellectual "property." Of course, my application would probably get rejected as prior art, but at least I could enjoy the irony.
The game described in this patent is nothing like Netrek; we're talking about a card game here. Is the US patent / legal system so screwed up that one couldn't defend themselves in court against this?
Essex university's MUD (circa 1977) would show that at least all the concepts of playing multi-player games on computer networks goes back quite a long way further than merely 1989. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-User_Dungeon for starters.
Patent granters should pay for damage done by granting frivolous patents.
Further discussion about that, here.
Did you even go there? If you did, I'd have thought the naming convention and it's reasons would be fairly obviously, even if you didn't stumble upon the reason why the 1extra "T" was omitted.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
The patent reads so broadly that it could probably apply to email chess tournaments and ladders. Fortunately, the larger organizations have all been around since before 1998.
My lawyers will be contacting /. I have a patent that covers the use of the English language. The rest of you here will be getting letters as well.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Dumb[ (nt) ] -> would have been offtopic.
Dumb[Stupid...] -> is redundant in and on itself.
I hope the EFF eventually turns to take down the patents locking up Internet faxing. Practically all regular telephone features are available in FOSS software (like Asterisk and better) that let people start up "telcos" to compete with the big ones for very little startup money and basic development time. All except Internet faxing, which J2 (formerly JFax) has locked up with patents.
Those fax patents are bogus. But destroying them would cost something like $millions which is more than any of its single licensees has to pay, so individuals just license it because that's cheaper.
If the EFF could organize potential licensees to fund an EFF suit to eliminate the bogus patent, it would free up Internet faxing for everyone. Which would mean that there would no longer be that single exception to "telephone service" that requries cutting in a patent extortionist. Which would mean FOSS Internet faxing SW could get development the way the rest of telephony has. Which would mean complete telcos could be started up without the costs and barriers that still keeps it an exclusive club for AT&T, Verizon and occasional VC funded "little giants" like Vonage.
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make install -not war
If they were sure their patent was valid they would go after the big players like Epic, id Software or EA, not the small ones that are intimidated easily but really just are statistical background noise when it comes to online games. If someone violates your patent then you go after the guy who does it big style...else you really just care about the quick money and not about holding up your claimed rights themselves.
but aren't patents supposed to cover a specific implementation of an idea? it seems that these days they get stretched to cover ALL implementations of an idea. perhaps i am being naive, but so often a patent is awarded, and they the holder sues anyone who does anything remotely similar. that ain't right.
hoping for a return to sanity....
Hit it weak point for MASSIVE DAMAGE
I don't see how the post was seen as flamebait (do you even know what flamebait is? it's not a flame), but whatever.
The point of a name, a trademark, a logo, a signature is to be informative without any other context. A reader shouldn't have to know the company history or the industrial interplays to take an impression from the name. This is *exactly* the same issue as the doublespeak you see in naming legislation these days: USAPATRIOT ACT sounds a hell of a lot more palatable than DESTROYINGDEMOCRACYTOSAVEIT ACT.
[
Back in the mid-80's when I was a BOFH we used to play snipes on Netware 2.11.
Snipes (diminutive for Snipers) is a text-mode networked computer game that was created in 1983 by SuperSet software. Snipes is officially credited as being the original inspiration for Novell NetWare. [2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
I spent many an hour back in the 80's beating up on lamers at Michigan and Stanford.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(computer_game)
http://www.lgm.com/bolo/intro/
In most cases I'd agree, but in this case the subject is the same as comment. It is self-redundant. However, I would have modded it "overrated". Either way, it serves to lower the AC's karma (he's logged in or he wouldn't have gotten the "Anonymous Modifier" and to make the comment less visible.
This comment is offtopic. As is yours. But as I have no need to be a karma whore (Karma-excellent) it doesn't matter. In fact I'm modding myself down by checking the "no karma bonus" box.
Of course, even though it is offtopic a mod may still mark it as interesting, informative, or insightful. I personally wish mods would stick to what fits best.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
which is essentially the same as saying, "If only there was no incentive for companies to obtain patents in the first place." I understand that from the perspective of good/evil or innovation/abuse, the problem is most apparent with submarine patents like the one in the article. But even in a perfect world where all actors obtain only valid and meaningful patents, those patents will be used by the rightsholder as a cudgel against other individuals and companies, to protect the patent-holder's monopoly on whatever the covered claims might be.
The problem is with government-sanctioned monopolies in general. And that problem can only be solved if enough people get pissed off that we force government to do something about it. Companies have been pushing to expand patent protections for a long time; the public pushback is just getting started. We should all be happy that the SCOTUS has shown some willingness to recognize the public interest in limited patents, especially considering the corporate pressure to do the exact opposite.
I think it's great that the EFF is fighting, and winning, battles exactly like this one. Their battles raise the visibility of the issue, and might eventually lead to a world where little guys who are threatened with junk patents like this one are willing to stand up and fight rather than give the bullies their lunch money.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
You guys don't know the half of the horror--The first thing I read was 'EFF Attacks Online Gaming Parents.
It continues to shock and amaze me how you can aggregate obvious ideas into obvious combinations and be granted a patent for your efforts.
Advertising and latter systems have been around since the beginning of time.. Anyone remember the Sierra Network?
LOL I wasn't the one who modded you Flamebait. ...I would have chosen "Offtopic."
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Just mail back "prior art ".
Cost: 1 stamp + 1 envelope
Use a home heater and burn the 600 pages to warm your house to offset the costs.
Do you think the judge would read the 600 pages?
Snipes was too advanced for us. We played hunt from VT100 terminals. It's still a good game, actually.
I would have chosen "Troll", since someone with that low a user ID probably isn't really ignorant enough to seriously make that post.
My father described playing "Battleships" over the phone network during WW2. No computers were involved, but WTF.
This patent is so obvious you dont even need to be experienced in the art. You dont even need to be an adult.
Perhaps there needs to be a class action against the USPTO by victims of stupid patents?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
So, as far as i can tell the patent seems crap, even if different crap than some others here seem to have implied. It only combines "online card games" with "targeted advertisement".
Even the little DOS game Sopwith Camel by David Clark, was network capable (1986):
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/127
This little game still works!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Patents are not really about broad idea, but about very specific inventions/implementations. It is all really about the specifications (what the patent office calls claims). Next time you hear about a wacko patent, sit down and read the claims. And claims tend to be written almost as dense as BNF grammar. This patent has over 100 claims to wade through. There may be prior art for each one, but you can not even guess if there really is prior art or if the invention was obvious from the title.
"netrek" is not a company name. It's the name of an old, free, noncommercial computer game, which is a Star Trek inspired networked teamwork shoot-em-up game with origins in University campuses of the 1980s. I graduated despite it.
I saw a ridiculous company name on the net recently btw. "halley.cc", can you believe that one?
I guess there wasn't a "-1, Don't know WTF you're talking about" mod, so flamebait had to do. It's not a good moderation, but it's not a surprising one.
Netrek wasn't some massive game project written by a major software house looking for VC funds or a buyout from Vivendi. It was real-time multiplayer strategy game written by a various people in the 80s and 90s for the fun of it, and evolved from much earlier games, written for research and/or amusement. Marketing wasn't really the point of it... most who played it were already computer + Star Trek geeks and the name made perfect sense to us. You will find many Unix people who were at a university in the early to mid 90s who have fond memories of it. Sorry you weren't a part of it. That's okay, I never heard of Meridian 59 until I looked at your resume, so we're even, I guess. I'm not a big online gamer, but I played the hell out of Netrek when I worked at a school in the 90s.
But why you're bitching about the name of a game that had its heyday 10+ years ago is beyond me, and I guess that's what drew the moderator's ire. The "net wreck" interpretation was not lost on the players, BTW. When the wartier features got bandied about by the developers, that term got tossed out more than once, and ISTR someone who played in the leagues used it as their nom de plume.
Send a fax over the web for free, powered by the open-source HylaFax faxing program.
TCP.INT has been at it since at least 1994. In '94 it was an email-to-fax gateway.
HylaFax dates back to the '90s at least.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
ISDN, "Integrierte Sprach- und Daten- -netz" came in the late 90s. Litteraly it means in German "Integrated Voice and Data Network" and it's basically that. A digital network used to exchange voice communication and exchange data (mostly, faxes back then. But also connect to the internet, etc...)
H323 came 1996. Technically, it's nothing more than "ISDN data packets - but over internet". To the point that transferring data between a digital phone network and an internet H323 network is trivial (it was a design goal). H323 was mainly advertised for it's video-conferencing capabilities. But because of it's ISDN-over-TCP/UDP nature, the other capabilities were available too : Voice, Messaging, and of course Fax.
J2 / JFax only came after. The earliest patent I can manage to find date back to 1998 (J2) and 1997 (Jfax). Given these dates whichever of the this patents is the "digital fax" one (sadly the reuters news that google reports don't mention the patent number), the whole H323 network concept is a giant prior art for a possible "fax over internet" and "internet and classical network fax interconnection".
In the realm of software patent, if you can think of some brilliant idea, suddenly realising that there a nice interesting and original usage of technology that exists for some time, and that you could patent the idea - someone else is bound to already have experimented and developed the idea back then when the technology first appeared. Most of the time, if you come up with a patent idea but don't have a product with you, you're late. Because the cost of developing a software is very low. And if the technology was available for you to see it and think of something now, the technology was available since it began existing for someone developing a product out of it.
Having a product when filing a software patent should be a requirement, in contrast to industry, where you can actually have a genuine a valid situation of someone filing a patent but no yet making products due to the high cost of starting developing it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
flamebait
flamebait
Posing 3 questions (4 technically) is more than enough to try and illicit response to your obvious flame, that would warrant a return flame. Thus, this is a prime example of "flamebait". Technically, you do not have to have flame post to have a 'flamebait' post. You just so happen to have both. This education segment has been brought to you by the letter "F" and the number "4".
These guys are supposed to review 4 new patents & 5 backlogged patent applications every week. Half the time it takes me 4 hours to figure out what the hell these lawyers are obscuring, let alone start looking for prior art. As for the guy above who said they need better experts, these are usually guys out of college - often lawyers waiting to pass the bar. For the most part they have no experience in the field that the patent is in. Hence what is novel to them is quite frequently common sense to people in the field. To present an example, the moron who managed to get a triple linked list patented. How traversing a list in 3 modes using object references is novel when traversing in 1 & 2 modes using object references is standard 1st year programming I don't know.
I believe the game you are looking for is called Conquest. It has of course been ported to Linux, and still is quite fun for multiplayer.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Evidently J2/JFax was suing Protus, which also threatened Hylafax the last couple-few years. But I've just been advised elsewhere in this thread that that specific suit has been dismissed. I'm not sure whether Hylafax is in the clear. But if not, it should be cheaper and easier now for the EFF to finally kill that last major obstacle to FOSS voice apps.
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make install -not war
Several of us in the Netrek community consulted with a set of patent defense lawyers back in 2000 to use Netrek as prior art to kill Patent number 5,822,523 claims 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, which also killed 6018766 I think.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5822523.html
I didn't get involved in consulting for the Goldberg patent, but I did in 2000. Had a few long face to face meetings with the defense's lawyers, showed them the game, did a technical presentation, presented a few packet logs, and got a few free meals out of it. From that, they understood the claims well enough that they got the appropriate declarations from the appropriate original developers.
The result of which the defense submitted a motion to declare the claims invalid, and the judge had a draft ruling granting the motion and was about to issue a final ruling, but the plaintiffs either dropped the case, or settled out of court. The parties were Lipstream vs. HearMe. (Lipstream were the defendants, HearMe the plaintiffs)
I have a PDF copy of the ruling somewhere in my archives. It used to be on netrek.org, but got dropped in a recent site-move and redesign.
--Carlos V.
I'm pretty sure Kali came out before WarcraftII (1994'ish). If that isn't prior art I don't know what is. Jay Cotton could confirm it.
http://www.kali.net/
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Why isn't the law in this area similar to trademark law?
I Ain't A Lawyer (see how that avoids "ANAL"?), but it's my understanding that if you knowingly allow people to infringe on your trademark then you basically lose the rights to it.
If patent holders were REQUIRED to go after anyone infringing on their patent then they'd have to go after the big firms that CAN afford to debunk it.
first widely used starting in the early 1970s
Follow the link - the online version had queues to play it. I used it at the University of Nebraska (Lincoln) and remember playing people in Europe and maybe Japan.
Compuserve's CyberStrike had teams and tournaments. Users added characters to their names to denote teams and there were pages where results of tournaments were displayed. Your general performance was also tracked I think. There was a chat room where you set up new games with other players. Officially released in 1993, it was in beta early 1992.
It was played on modems and had 16 color VGA graphics. It was team oriented as you had colored bases and drove your 'pod' around extending your team's territory and shooting the other teams' pods on a field with various objects to jump on and hide behind.
Caltech student David R. I. Bell unleashed a "Moo" tournament for the PDP-10 ca. 1975. My recollection of this game is similar to the patent claims: it was a tournament format allowing multiple players to play in the same tournament simultaneously. Last I heard Dave was in Australia, but that was decades ago. Sorry I can't help more, but a lead is a lead!
The captcha is MUNCHED. If you had a [29970,XXX] PPN and knew Dave, you'll know why that's strangely appropos.
Empire on PLATO was a real-time 2d 30-player Star Trek game. 4 teams, up to 15 on a team, 30 total players. Had an all-time Hall of Fame, Tournaments, and a set of Monthly records. Also kept track of team victories (conquering all the planets).
Silas Warner is credited as one of the co-creators of Empire. He's dead according to platopeople.com. I think some of the others involved included John Daleske and Chuck Miller.
I played (OK, was seriously addicted to) Empire from 1975 to 1981.
May I suggest a quick lunch'n'learn at the Department of Redundancy Department?
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?